X finds 200 bots pushing anti-data center propaganda

X says it caught a piece of a much larger information operation this week: 200 accounts, embedded inside a bot farm of roughly 200,000, dedicated to shaping American opinion on AI data centres.

X's Global Government Affairs team described the 200 accounts as posting in ways that could distort "a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy", using AI-generated cartoons that portrayed data centre operators profiting while ordinary households absorbed rising costs.

X didn't disclose what the remaining 199,800 accounts in the network were posting about.

OpenAI flagged a similar operation in June, describing China-based ChatGPT users generating English-language content around a campaign it internally labelled "Data Center Bandwagon", alongside posts criticising US tariff policy.

X's findings include at least two images that reportedly match ones from OpenAI's earlier report, suggesting the same content is being recycled and redistributed across platforms rather than freshly generated each time.

That’s where things become difficult because the specific narrative that the bots have been peddling, which is the fact that data centres are driving up electricity bills for households, stands the test of scrutiny. According to Bloomberg's research, electricity prices near data centres have increased by 267% in five years.

According to Goldman Sachs, electricity prices increased by 6.9% compared to the previous year, which is over double the rate of inflation, with data centres estimated to account for around 40% of power consumption growth during the decade.

Resistance to data centre facilities has been growing without any help from any foreign influence operation. A data centre project in Michigan was expected to use 1.4 gigawatts, which is about as much as a nuclear power plant would produce.

Data centres in Virginia used 1.85 billion gallons of water in 2023, which is a big increase from 1.13 billion gallons in 2019, and one data centre in Georgia used 29 million gallons before people there were even charged for it.